Pallava dynasty

Kāñcī

The Pallavas appear in the Andhra–Tamil borderland in the third century CE, issuing Prakrit charters, and by the sixth century are established at Kāñcīpuram as the principal power of the northern Tamil country. Kāñcī became one of the great cities of southern India — a centre of Sanskrit learning, of Buddhist and Jain institutions, and later of Vaiṣṇava and Śaiva temple religion.

Their long war with the Chalukyas of Bādāmi ran for over a century. Pulakeśin II took Kāñcī's outskirts; Narasiṃhavarman I retaliated by capturing and sacking Vātāpi in 642, an event his inscription there records in the Chalukya capital itself.

Mahabalipuram

Mahendravarman I, in the early seventh century, began cutting temples into living rock rather than building them of brick and timber — his own inscription at Mandagapattu notes the innovation, that the shrine was made without brick, timber, metal or mortar. His successors carried the experiment to the shore at Māmallapuram.

What survives there is a working record of an architectural tradition inventing itself: the five rathas, each a monolithic shrine carved from a single boulder in a different plan and roof form; the great relief usually called the Descent of the Ganges or Arjuna's Penance, a rock face thirty metres wide covered with gods, sages, animals and a family of elephants; cave temples with narrative panels; and finally the Shore Temple, built of dressed stone rather than cut from rock, which marks the transition to structural building.

Narasiṃhavarman II built the Kailāsanātha temple at Kāñcīpuram, the first major structural temple of the south and the direct model for what the Cholas would later do at Thanjavur.

Bhakti and the end

The Pallava centuries are those of the Tamil bhakti movement. The Nāyaṉmār and the Āḻvārs — the Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava poet-saints — sang in Tamil across this country, and their hymns displaced Jainism and Buddhism from the position they had held in the Tamil south. Some of the Pallava kings were themselves converts; Mahendravarman I is said to have moved from Jainism to Śaivism under Appar's influence.

The dynasty was ended around 897 by Āditya I of the resurgent Cholas, and the Tamil country passed to Thanjavur.